Jock Serong
Jock Serong talks about the writing craft and process behind his novel Cherrywood.
Jock tells us how this novel started with several image fragments and a variety of influences, from Peter Carey’s Oscar & Lucinda and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, to Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree, and the Narnia Chronicles, with a little Dickens and Austen thrown in.
Jock’s explanation of how a handful of ideas became a story is one of the best I've heard. He also tells us his thoughts on writing place as character, how to describe minor characters so they stand out, how the structure of the novel changed, breaking the ‘show don't tell’ rule, and why the editing process should be considered cooperative rather than corrective.
ABOUT CHERRYWOOD
Edinburgh, 1916: A rich Scottish industrialist, Thomas Wrenfether, impulsively embarks on a mad scheme to build a paddlesteamer out of dubiously sourced European cherrywood on the other side of the world, in booming Melbourne, Australia. But nothing goes according to plan.
Melbourne, 1993: Martha is a clever, lonely and frustrated lawyer. One night, on impulse, she stops at a strange pub in Fitzroy, The Cherrywood, for a bottle of wine. The mysterious building and its inhabitants make an indelible impression, and she slowly begins to deduce odd truths about the pub.
From multi-award-winning author Jock Serong comes a darkly delicious, playful and rich novel about legacy, community, wonder, love and reinvention - Cherrywood is haunting, magical and a true original.
ABOUT JOCK SERONG
Jock Serong is the author of Quota, winner of the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction; The Rules of Backyard Cricket, shortlisted for the 2017 Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction, finalist of the 2017 MWA Edgar Awards for Best Paperback Original, and finalist of the 2017 Indie Book Awards Adult Mystery Book of the Year; and On the Java Ridge, which won the Colin Roderick Award and, internationally, the inaugural Staunch Prize (UK), and was shortlisted for the 2018 Indie Awards. He has won praise for his trilogy of historical novels Preservation; The Burning Island, which earned him the ARA Historical Novel Prize and the Historia Award for Historical Crime Fiction (France); and The Settlement, which was shortlisted for the Voss Prize and the ARA Historical Novel Prize.
Website: www.jockserong.com
Buy Cherrywood by Jock Serong here.
Buy Dirrayawadha by Anita Heiss here.
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This podcast is recorded on the beautiful, unceded lands of the Garigal people of the Eora nation.
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